IBM aims to help companies with the convergence of big data and mobile (video)

We caught up with Leigh Williamson, a distinguished engineer at IBM, to find out what Big Blue has been up to in the mobile app space — and how it’s working even closer than ever with developers.

According to Williamson, IBM has been focused on the convergence of two big trends: The rise of “big data” analysis and the concurrent ability for software to “learn” from huge datasets, and the increasingly mobile distribution of our technology.

“We see this convergence as being a real new era of IT, that’s taking the existing systems and causing them to be re-architected and redeveloped,” Williamson told us at DevBeat, VentureBeat’s recent developer-focused conference.

Along with that convergence, the rise of cloud-based hosting gives developers more flexibility and elasticity to support computing loads that may rise and fall unpredictably.

That’s going to be even more critical as the mobile world shifts toward the era of wearable devices: glasses, wristbands, watches, and other devices that are attached to our bodies almost always, continually generating data that can be processed by mobile apps and by cloud services.

“These smart devices, these wearables or ‘Internet of things’ end points, need to have a well-architected API layer in the middle before they get to the cloud services,” Williamson said.

To help developers, IBM is building a full cloud-hosted development platform, which includes everything from initial coding to testing to deployment.

“We’ve always had an affinity with the development community, and we’re just taking the opportunity to refocus and re-invigorate that focus,” Williamson said.

Watch the whole video to find out more about IBM’s mobile development tools and how its global services unit can help customers get on board the convergence of mobile devices and big data.

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International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM and nicknamed Big Blue (for its official corporate color), is a global technology and innovation company headquartered in the Northeast US. IBM is the largest technology and ... read more »